Send to a friendWill tax returns help Mitt Romney?

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Jeffrey C. StewartProfessor of Black Studies at University of California at Santa Barbara :

Romney's release of his tax returns is "too little, too late." He needed to have done that two weeks ago. Speed in politics is everything, as Obama has learned over these last three years. It's hard to imagine that releasing them now will help eliminate the perception that he is a fat cat who does not want people to know how much he is benefiting from an unfair tax structure. Paying three million in taxes on 21 million in income seems ridiculous compared to what middle class earners have to pay, which is usually close to 25 percent of their income.

What the last two weeks has shown is Romney's detachment from how the bulk of the electorate feels the increasing economic disparity between rich and formerly middle class, now working poor. And what works against Romney is that the usual Republican defense of this anomaly - that the upper one percent are the job creators for the lower 99 percent - is abundantly untrue with Romney and the other corporate raiders who make millions off of downsizing dying corporations.

Releasing his income tax returns would work well for him only if he simultaneously announced, "I realize that I benefited from a tax code that is patently unfair to the working families of this nation, and I am announcing today a plan to reform the tax code if elected so that in the future, people who earn money on investments pay the same tax rate as those who earn it sweating it out at a job." If he did that, his polling numbers would skyrocket. But he won't. Warren Buffett he is not.

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